'My original offer still holds,' Mr. Ferris said. 'Eight thousand dollars to the man who helps me recover that payroll. That's quite a bit of money Shad – for a young man and his girl to start on.'
Eight-thousand dollars. _Eighty-thousand dollars if I kill him_. But how can you kill an unarmed man who just stands there with his hand in his pocket, smiling at you, smoking, and talking kindly?
He stood up and tested his game leg.
'Does that hurt you?' Mr. Ferris asked solicitously.
'No. I'm used to hit.' Then he grinned. 'I still got some in my seater from when I was sixteen and old man Duffy caught me in the barn with his daughter.'
Mr. Ferris smiled. 'Chased you over the fence, eh? Like the proverbial shotgun farmer and the boy with the stolen watermelon.'
'_Helped me_ over the fence is nearer to hit.'
And they both laughed; and then Mr. Ferris dropped his cigarette in the water.
'Well,' he said, 'which way do we go – back the way we came?'
21
Shad decided to take Jort's skiff. It was a good craft, and now that Jort wouldn't be needing it there wasn't any sense in letting it rot in the bog. To Mr. Ferris' question, 'Are you going to leave yours here?' he said, 'Yeah. I'll pick it up another time.'
Mr. Ferris nodded. 'Well, perhaps it'll come in handy for that Parks person.'
Shad looked up. 'Sam? Sam's dead, Mr. Ferris.'
'Dead?'
'Same as. If he ain't panther-clawed er gator-et er cottonmouth-bit, then the pin-downs will kill him.'
'It's as dangerous as that?'
'Dangerous enough fer anybody,' Shad said. 'But it's real bad fer a fella like Sam. He'll go coo-coo inside an hour, and once you press your panic button _you're through_.'
Mr. Ferris said nothing more. He climbed into the skiff and went forward. He was thinking how incongruously these people were made. Sam, Jort, and Shad would bend over backward to evade physical labour for wages – and yet would rush to this nightmarish land with open arms to pit their lives against gaining something for nothing.
They went on down-slough, slipping by the palmetto bend where Shad had set Margy ashore. But he didn't stop to go find her because he hadn't made up his mind about Mr. Ferris. He had to make up his mind right soon – yes or no. But if it was yes, what would he do it with? He'd left the bow and arrows behind deliberately because he never wanted to use them again on anything.
He skirted the skiff along the mudbank where the thicket of pink hurrah blossoms, white Cherokee, yellow jasmine and bloody ivy trumpets stood like a floral paper on one wall of a green room. He spotted the cross he'd blazed on a cypress trunk.
'This here's it,' he said, and ran the skiff into the mud.
As Mr. Ferris climbed from the skiff Shad rummaged under the stern's seat and found what he thought he would – an old nick-bladed hatchet. Mr. Ferris stood in the mud, looked at the hatchet, then at Shad; but Shad had his eyes averted.
'We got to go easy,' he warned. 'This here's gator ground.'
They went hands and knees through the thicket tunnel, Shad leading, Mr. Ferris close on his tail. Shad kept listening for gator-grunting but couldn't catch any. Even the musky gator odour was gone, as though vanquished by the poisonous scent of lush jungle flowers and the rot and decay of the bog.
The tunnel opened, the bank shelved down, and the pond stretched away to the far green wall, to the giant cypress all adrape with the brown tendrils of a bullace vine, and the suspended Money Plane. Shad straightened up, staring, unconscious of Mr. Ferris behind him.
Finding the pond and the Money Plane for the second time was like stumbling upon the materialization of a childhood dream – or nightmare. The enigmatic structure of the place brushed him with a peculiar uneasiness, and a sense of moral disturbance that he couldn't understand settled on him like in indescribable malaise. They stood side by side in the soft mud and stared.
There was nothing and there was everything, and all of it still. There was the torpid water, black except where the jungle reflected a dull green, and there was the water grass and the pickerelweed, and scattered on the surface the never-wet leaves and the bonnets.
A good-God flock of green-winged teal flicker-flacked overhead with their multitude of wings; and when the men suddenly looked up, the flock slammed the sky with a whamp! and veered into a new thunderous course.
The mood was dispelled. Mr. Ferris cleared his throat and said, 'How do we get to it?'
Shad simply said, 'Raft,' and went into the thicket to chop up some lightwood logs. Mr. Ferris smoked a cigarette while Shad constructed the raft. It was a hurried, patchwork affair – five logs lashed with vine, a yard wide and two long.
'I ain't going at this proper,' Shad said, 'because I don't want to take the time. We'll have to ditch our boots and tail the bottom-end of us in the water.'
'That's all right,' Mr. Ferris said. He looked across the pond at the Money Plane. 'As long as we get there and back.' Then – 'Are there alligators?'
Shad didn't look up. 'Guess not. 'Pear to be all gone. Last time I was here they was a God-awful gator nest just down-slough.' He stood up, raising the rickety raft, and said, 'Let's go.'
They left their boots standing four-at-attention on the bank and waded into the pond, prodding the raft ahead. Far off a poor-joe bird squawked at something, and closer in they heard a panther cough. Then there was nothing, only a water snake draped on a breather.
'We used to go rafting like this when I was a boy in Ohio.' Mr. Ferris' voice had the quiet tone of camaraderie. 'There was a river near our farm.'
It startled Shad to hear that Mr. Ferris had once been a farm boy
'That so? So did we when I was a tad.' And right then he was quite certain that he wasn't going to kill the man.
The water slipped past their knees and they hunched themselves up on the raft, leaning forward on elbows, forearms and abdomens, and started scissor-kicking with their feet. The going slowed when they ploughed into the golden-heart bed, but there was no way around it. They pawed the lilies aside and kicked the raft on. Above them loomed the giant cypress and the rust-stained Money Plane.
They sloshed onto the bank, pulling the raft after them, and then, in mute agreement, paused to stare up at the wrecked airplane.
'You mind being around dead men, Mr. Ferris?' Shad asked. 'I mean
Mr. Ferris looked at him.
'No,' Shad said. 'I reckon not. Well, let's git up and see how they ben keeping.'
The scut-shot gator was hungry. He'd been prowling the waterway for hours but hadn't found anything to satisfy him. Now he entered the Money Plane pond. He looked around, saw nothing, and then submerged himself and tail-hitched over to the distant weed bed. He watched the translucent water, waiting to see what might come wandering downstream. His passage had stirred up a slimy colony of black leeches and they were wiggling around him wormlike. But he didn't pay them any mind. After a while he surfaced effortlessly. He looked just like a barely drifting log.
In the musty cabin of the Money Plane Shad and Mr. Ferris squatted where they could find room and looked at the mouldy bags of clothing that contained all that remained of the payroll agent known as Hartog and the pilot known as Willy.
'I like to think they was friends,' Shad said. 'Seeing that they had to go at hit together.'
Mr. Ferris looked at him. 'Where's the brief case?'
